Posts Tagged ‘Pluto’

Click on Exogeology ROCKS! Episodes/ Meet Real Exogeologists on the sidebar. Exogeology ROCKS! is a video I made about what exogeology is, and an interview with a real exogeologist. I hope it helps you see that exogeology really does ROCK! I filmed, hosted, interviewed, and edited the whole 20 minute movie. It was hard, but really fun. See what you think of it!

Whenever I try to tell anyone what my job title is, nobody understands! I got so frustrated when I went to a geology conference and everybody kept asking me what my sign was! That’s not what I do! I’m pretty sure I’m a Virgo, but I have no idea what that means! The same thing happens when I meet astronomers. They keep assuming that I know stuff like the capital of Nebraska. I am not an astrologer and not a geographer, I’m an astronomer who is also a geologist.

Sometimes people just slip up even when they do know the difference. I had a pretty funny conversation with my grandparents when I tried to explain my job. Here’s pretty much how it went:

Me: “Grandpa, I’m not a cartoon artist. How’d we even get on that subject? I study things like volcanoes and craters. Geology. And I haven’t tried to draw Pluto. But there’s this spacecraft that’s headed to…oh, that Pluto.”

Grandma: “Oh, geometry, with the shapes!”

Me: “That’s mathematics, Grandma. I’m an exogeologist. That’s a combination of geology and astronomy. I look at space rocks.”

Grandma: “Like the astronauts got from the moon?”

Me: “Yes! Exactly!”

Grandpa: “That sounds fun.”

Me: “Yes, it ROCKS!”

Grandma: “So when will you be going to the moon?”

I hope this helps you to tell the differences between exogeology and completely different jobs. My grandparents finally understood after that long conversation, and I can usually get people to at least say it right. People who just haven’t heard of exogeology, or even geology or astronomy, are just part of the job. I can’t blame them really, although it is annoying. For now, I’m Petra Stone signing off. Exogeology ROCKS!

As I said before, part of being an exogeologist is getting to explore! From the bright Sun and its flares, to the outermost reaches of the Oort cloud, exogeologists get to see it all! The most exciting part is discovering new things about unexplored places.

Moons are some of the most diverse objects; some are like planets with volcanoes and atmospheres, and others are like asteroids with odd shapes and cratered surfaces. Titan has a thick and hazy atmosphere, which just makes me wonder, “What’s down there?”

Exogeologists like myself decided that Titan was a good place to explore. The Cassini-Huygens mission was and is set to explore and study Saturn and Titan. The Huygens lander detached from the Cassini spacecraft and landed on Titan. It found that there is water ice on Titan, the atmosphere is made of methane and nitrogen, and there even seems to be an underground ocean of liquid water! How cool! Literally, because Titan is so cold being so far from the Sun.

Speaking of being cold and far from the Sun, exogeology is also used for studying Kuiper Belt objects, or KBOs. The most famous KBO is Pluto, the famous dwarf planet. Just let me call it a dwarf planet for the purposes of this one blog, okay? Pluto and other dwarf planets are mostly made of rock and ice, like asteroids. We don’t have many good photographs of Kuiper Belt objects, so that’s one thing that I’d like to do in the future: take pictures of KBOs.

Whether Pluto is a planet or not is a topic that’s had a lot of controversy since the term “planet” was defined. According to the new definition, a planet must: (1) orbit the Sun, (2) be basically round, and (3) have “cleared the neighborhood” around its orbit. Pluto fits all the requirements except for having cleared the area. Since it’s not a satellite of something else, it’s now considered a dwarf planet.

Pluto has been considered a planet for long enough now though that many people are upset by reclassifying Pluto as a dwarf planet.

I wonder if getting a better idea of what Pluto is like will help settle the debate? The New Horizons probe’s mission is planned to explore the Kuiper Belt and Pluto. It’s scheduled to arrive on July 14, 2015, making a flyby. That’s pretty soon considering how long of a mission it is to get there! I can’t wait to find out what it sees. Meanwhile, the Hubble Space Telescope got some good photographs of Pluto changing seasons, and New Horizons made a flyby of Jupiter.

What do I think? I believe that dwarf planets should be considered a specific type of planet, like terrestrial planets and gas giants. They should be considered just as important as any other planets. But there’s a good reason for changing the definition of “planet”; there are so many dwarf planets still being discovered that the number of planets in the Solar System would be hard to keep track of. Besides, we need a way to distinguish between planets and asteroids, and dwarf planets are somewhere in between. No matter what the definition of planet is though, Pluto is still an important member of the Solar System.